Phoneme awareness is the ability to recognize
sounds in
vocal gestures and words. Phoneme awareness is very important for
reading.
Beginning readers need lots of practice with phonemes to be able to
decode
words. In this lesson I am going to teach the letter correspondence e =
/e/.
The students will learn, through a letter box lesson and the reading of
a book,
how to spell, read, and recognize words with the e = /e/ sound.

Materials:

Picture of a creaky door

Copy of the tongue twister: Everybody saw
Eddie and the Eskimo enter the elevator on the elephant.

1.
Place the picture of the creaky door on the board. Inform the children
about when you open a creaky door it says e = /e/. Show the children
the hand
gesture of opening a creaky door. "Can you make the creaky door sound
with
me?" "Good job everyone." "This is the sound that the short
e makes."

2.
Now place the tongue twister in front of the class. "We are going
to say this tongue twister, but first I am going to read it to you and
the
second time we will read it as a class and we will stretch out our /e/
sound."
Use the pointer to point to each word during the tongue twister. Everybody saw Eddie and the Eskimo enter the
elevator on the elephant. "Now
we are going to say it together, remember to stretch out the /e/ sound." "Eeeeeverybody
saw Eeeeddie and the Eeeeskimo eeenter the eeelevator on the
eeelephant."
Good job, I love hearing that creaky door /e/."

3. Give
each child a set of Elkonin boxes and the pre-selected letters that
spell the
words that will be given. First model how to spell the word with the e
= /e/
correspondence. "I am going to do
the first word to show you what to do. "The first
word is get." "I am going to stretch out
all of the sounds that I hear, ggggg, eeeee,
tttttt.The first sound I hear
is the ggggg sound, so I am going to put a /g/ in the first box. I
believe that
I hear our creaky door sound next, so I will put a /e/ in the second
box. Ok,
now I have ggggg, eeeee. T comes next
because of the ttttttt sound, so I will put a /t/ in the last box. I
think that
is all the sounds in get, let me check, ggggg/eeeee/tttttt. Yes! That
is it!
Now, let us see if you can do some on your own."

4.
Now begin the Letter Box Lesson. In the word list include words that
contain
/e/ but also include review words. Call out one word at a time while
the
teacher walks around the room to provide guided assistance. If a
student
misspells a word, pronounce it exactly as they have spelled it and ask
them to
try again. Once all the students have spelled all of the words
correctly move
on to the next word. LBL word list: 2 phonemes: at; 3 phonemes: tan,
hen, bed;
4 phonemes: shred, help, send; 5 phonemes: spent; Once all of the words
have
been spelled, have the students read the words from the note cards,
teacher
will model first. "I am going to
show you how to read the first word. The word is s-h-r-e-d. Let us see,
sh says /sh/, and r makes the /r/
sound, while the d makes the /d/ sound and we learned
today that the e makes the /e/
sound. So if I put all of this together, sshh/rrr/eee/ddd . Shred! The
word is
shred." After all of the words have been read, take up all of
the
materials from the LBL.

5.
Divide
the students into groups of two and give each group a book, Red
Gets Fed. Give a brief book talk so
that the students get excited about the book. "Red is a dog who loves
his
friend Meg. Red is trying to wake up Meg, what do you think Red is
wanting from
Meg? Let's read to find out!" Inform the students that one partner is
to
read one page and the other partner is to read the next, they will keep
switching until they have read the whole book. The teacher will walk
around
while the groups are reading to monitor their reading.

6.
After they have finished their reading, they are to return their book
to the teacher and they will get a piece of paper and a pencil from the
teacher. The students will write a message about what their favorite
food is.

7.
While the students are writing their message, the teacher will call up
each
child individually to assess their knowledge of the e = /e/
correspondence by
how many pseudo words they get correctly. The teacher will give the
list of
words to the student and if the student pronounces the e = /e/
correctly in a
word, the teacher will give them credit for that particular word. This
will
provide a wonderful assessment of the students ability to read using
this
correspondence.